Honourable senators, Black History Month is a wonderful opportunity for me to share stories of Alberta history that might surprise you. Last year, I told you the tale of Joseph Lewis, the free Black voyageur who arrived in Alberta in 1799. Today, I want to share the story of pioneer Effie Jones.

Effie was born in the United States and travelled to Alberta as a child in the early 1900s. Her family was part of a wave of African American pioneers who fled poverty and racism in places such as Oklahoma and Alabama for new lives in northern Alberta communities such as Amber Valley, Barrhead and Breton.

Effie’s family farmed in Athabasca country, and that’s where she met and married her husband, Sam — except Sam wasn’t his real name. Effie defied cultural norms and expectations and married a man named Sohan Singh Bhullar. Sam, to his friends, was one of Alberta’s very first Sikh settlers. He left his home in Punjab when he was 18 and arrived in Alberta in 1907. He worked first as a farm labourer until he saved enough money to buy his own farm.

He married Effie Jones in 1926. To judge by photographs, she was strikingly beautiful, he was very handsome and their multicultural marriage seems to have been a happy and successful one. They had seven children and farmed together until they moved to Edmonton in 1953, at a time when Edmonton’s South Asian community was tiny indeed. They bought a house right next to the University of Alberta campus, and their home became a gathering place for students and other newcomers from South Asia. Effie herself embraced Punjabi culture and cuisine, and travelled to India with her husband.

One of their seven children, their daughter Judi Singh, was an acclaimed singer in the Canadian jazz scene of the 1970s, recording several albums and working closely with the great jazz pianist Tommy Banks, who would himself go on to become a distinguished member of this chamber. I guess you could say we’re all three or four degrees of separation from Effie Jones.

Effie and Sohan were married for 42 years. He died in November 1968, and she died just a month later. In 1985, a park in Edmonton was named for Sohan Singh Bhullar, but there’s no monument yet for Effie Jones.

Today, let’s remember her as a bold, courageous and generous risk taker, and celebrate their unorthodox cross-cultural love story, a story as Albertan and Canadian as you could ever want it to be.